Dionysus
by Elizawriter
Summary: "My dream begins with Nibiru. And Spock is already burning..." Mere months into their five-year mission, the crew of the Enterprise encounter a world unlike any other. FULL-LENGTH Fic.
1. Incendiary

**Disclaimer**: Star Trek is not my world, just a place I go to play.

**Author's Notes**: If 'Twilight' was 'Pride and Prejudice', and 'The Lion King' was 'Hamlet', then this is 'The Great Gatsby'. From green light to green blood.

**Beta'd** by Miranda River, read her epic Spock/Uhura tale, 'Nar'.

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Dionysus

by Elizawriter

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Chapter 1 - Incendiary

Nibiru. My dream begins with Nibiru. And Spock is already burning; Prime Directives, Cold Fusion and a swirling mass of heat and lava and rock, a burning garden, roiling on top of itself. I have to watch. I am communications officer. It is my job to listen and wait, to hear what, if anything, will happen. Perhaps they will decide to save the man I claim to love, the man who claims to love me. Perhaps.

What would Spock do if he were here? Would he let them die? Would he let me die if our roles were reversed? He had not let Sarek die. He had not let Kirk die. Still, I say nothing and they do nothing but watch as the fusion process renders him inert: a stone man in an ice volcano with a cracked heart, casting shadow on billowing rocks, the way wind does on sea.

I wake, my body jerking, with sweat that sticks my sheets in an awkward tangle. I am lying in the same bed with the man I love and I wake to find him alive, lyre by his side, green blood flowing in his veins, knowing he could have died, but he is mine. I am in love with him. I am. He occupies my mind as I do his but my heart is a mess.

They say 'the final frontier' is out there, in deep space. I think it's in here, in the minds and eyes of lonely voyagers like me, trying to make a place for ourselves in a Universe which keeps expanding.

I get up and walk through my dim quarters, fresh lilac and rose, fragile and bound into the ship. I want windows, open and gloaming, and hot fresh air. I tap on the console and a breeze blows through, rustling the beads hanging from my ceiling at one end and out the other, twisting them up towards my starry ceiling, pouring over the grass-coloured rug like pale ghosts.

Four months into a five-year mission to seek out new worlds, new life, new civilisations. We're going but I'm not at all sure if we're going boldly. We're going tentatively, carefully. The ship is full of cautious people. We have been crushed too many times. So many crew wanted reassignment back in San Francisco, and I don't blame them. A deathtrap they called it, a death magnet. First Nero, then Khan. I don't blame them, I have to call things as they are. This is no longer my 'ship of dreams'. I have lost too many friends and comrades upon it, felt and watched life ebb away from those I love. There is despair in the conduits. It is as though the ship itself is scared, even our captain has died and lives in a thrift shop life, bought for him by Bones.

The only completely stationary object in my room is my boyfriend. He is seated in bed now, solid, nigh immoveable, simply watching me. The way he stares, I have a startling notion he hears my thoughts.

How long has he been awake and how long has he been watching?

"I'm okay."

"My judgment contravenes yours. I am doubtful that is the case." He moves ever so slightly, deliberately towards me, calculating my response, listening to my body, not really listening to me.

"And doubt is the beginning of all knowledge?" I can hear the antagonism creeping into my voice. In the sight of a Vulcan, I have lost this argument before it has even begun.

"From your facial expression, I surmise that you are angry with me. I do not understand the reason why. Perhaps if you relay the subject of your nightmare..." He moves out of the bed, fluid and agile, and stands. Whenever we disagree he moves to stand. Does he realise he does this? That he faces me as though we are warriors, about to duel.

"I don't want to talk about it." I fold my arms.

"Nyota, I heard you say the word 'Nibiru'."

He pauses. His gaze pierces me as it always does. He knows the answer but he is not replying. It's infuriating. Is this what other people feel? This splicing awkwardness.

"Your skin, you are too hot." I rub my temples, prickly irritation is overwhelming me. I am the tired that cannot sleep.

"Please, elaborate." He takes another step forward.

"I can't sleep."

"You fell asleep reading... I have explained to you that this unsettles the mind and does not provide restive sleep." Another step.

"How would you know, you barely sleep?" I move back. I know what he wants to do. He wants to touch me. I don't, at this precise moment, want to be touched. There's an irony in there somewhere.

"I can survive numerous days without it." He moves again. The space that was between us, the lilac ocean of fluorescent light is gone.

"So why are you here? Why do you still come and stay with me, to watch me toss and turn?" I look up at him defiantly. He wants close, I get close, in his face, my expression full of bile.

"I simply prefer to spend my off-duty hours in your presence. We have had an unspoken agreement and I have believed prior to this conversation that my presence has been a source of comfort to you." His body language doesn't change but his words get faster, this means agitation, this is the closest he can get to shouting.

I don't say anything. I can't see around him. I take a step back, and another. My back is against a wall. It is cold against me, this ship, suffocating me a little more every day, suffocating us. The same walls, the same corridors, ladders, bridge, engine room and the same damn Captain and crew having the same conversations in a mess hall which serves the same food.

I go to my room and reset to live the life I lived the day before. I don't even dare to say it, to think that perhaps, this dream has become a nightmare. And I don't even think he can tell. There's a desperateness in me, a frantic desire to connect the way we did before, on Earth. These light-days and light-nights have put so much distance between us.

"Would you prefer it if I went to my quarters, Lieutenant?" Slower now. As slowly as if he were speaking to me on the bridge about something completely lacking in urgency. I want to throttle him. Lieutenant? Lieutenant? He cannot hide behind that mode of address, the very British way politeness can be swapped for a slap in the face.

He masks his annoyance with me poorly now. And I am reminded at moments like this. Ever since Khan and the near-death of Kirk and the grief. I forget we were happy for a time, for the moment which was a year in our lives back in San Francisco, working at the Academy, working to help with the rebuilding effort in the city, with recruitment, with the xeno-linguistics department. Dining in public. Feeling like a couple.

I had not expected deep space to be like this. While his friendship with Kirk flourishes, our relationship dwindles. We are a dying light. Or it feels to me as if it's disappearing. Everything is. Earth recedes. The candle dies.

"If you want to go, then go." I watch the words form an ocean between us, filling the room with water that neither can cross. I turn away, and step into the bathroom. I let myself sigh. I am a helium balloon, floating up into an atmosphere made up of tears. I am a distant planet. I am surrounded by Klingon warriors, with only my words for comfort. I am alone in the dark.

His arms are strong around me. They anchor me to the ground, they pull me down from the sky. No one should float so high, or so wild. No one should be an island. No planet should be without allies.

We do not speak.

I am afraid. I am afraid of losing him again. And of losing myself. And that is what the dreams are telling me. I dread a time we will not be together. I dread the thought that we will be separated by events so much bigger than us, or worse, by events within us, the anomalies of the heart.

I want to be together.

I want to be you and me.

I don't want you to burn alone.

He grips me tight and I let the tears fall. Finally, allowed to cry, to be weak, to be frail and illogical. To be. This is me. This is what I am on the inside. Under the toughened shell. When the nightmare is so close, too close, and the threat of expulsion is too great, this is who I am.

He knows that already. He has known it for years. Since the moment we first melded, and I revealed to him my darkest secret, the death of my Uncle and the way I saved my parents' lives. When he kissed me then, I had felt whole.

I turn to him in the dark bathroom. He holds me but I cannot feel his arms. I am numb. He presses my body close, chest bare, skin hot to the touch. He is already burning. He always has been.

There is nothing irrational about my fear that Spock will die. He launches himself into the threat of death without a moment's thought. He doesn't think of me first. He doesn't think of how I will survive, of the person I will change into after the grief of losing him has finished with me.

I let him touch my forehead with his own. I let him touch my mind with his fingers. I know what he wants.

"Your mind to my mind. Your thoughts to my thoughts."

A fake calm comes over me. A calm that does not belong to me. I am a rushing, screaming, battling creature. This is how I have always been, dynamic. I am not a soft, near-silent sway on a ripple-less lake surface. I am not harmonious piano keys, flowing one after the other. I am discordance. Or at least I feel like discordance. And slowly, I melt, following his calm. It is a lake and I want to dive in, to sleep in it.

There are pale colours here, shimmering. I float on them, buoyed up away and away from the troubled thoughts which have plagued me. This is what his meditations look like. What a wonderful spectroscopic mirage, this meld has become. I feel myself beginning to let go of hurt, of rage, of frustration...

"Commander Spock, this is Kirk. Come in, Spock." A brittle voice fills the air: James. He cracks and splinters the calm, drying all the wet places. Spock reaches for the wall console, pulling me out of deep deep water, onto parched land.

I am afraid instantly. Nothing hits a person as fast as fear, not even phaser-fire. I am terrified of what Kirk's communication has stopped and I am so angry at him I could punch the wall. He stands between us, his voice, his resurrected form, his Captaincy. I am not ready to be in the dry place alone. I have not taken my fill of the calmness in Spock's mind.

"Captain."

"Commander, the bridge needs you."

"May I inquire as to the reason of this 'need', Sir?" To question a direct command is so unlike Spock. It tells me he does not want to go. It tells me he is afraid too.

"All I can say is there's something up here you're going to want to see!"

"Captain, I doubt that you can determine the degree to which I will 'want' anything. However, I will be with you, shortly."

Spock kisses my forehead, barely looking at me. His lips, still orgastic, hold a promise that now eludes me. We hold each other tight for one more moment. And like a doused flame, he is gone.

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_You know what to do, please leave a review :)_


	2. Byron and Keats

**Disclaimer**: Star Trek is not my world, just a place I go to play.

**Beta'd** by Miranda River, read her epic Spock/Uhura tale, 'Nar'.

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Dionysus

by Elizawriter

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Chapter 2 - Byron and Keats

_"Love is my religion_

_and I could die for that._

_I could die for you._

_―John Keats_

I leave Nyota unwillingly. Logic governs me and logic determines that the needs of my Captain and the many crew far outweigh the need of my beloved. It would serve no purpose to explain that my personal preference would be to aid her. My personal preference is of no consequence.

In the 4.3 minutes it takes to change into my uniform, she does not leave the bathroom. I do not detect the sound of any movement at all. It is possible she wants to wait for me to leave her quarters. However, with Nyota, the opposite is often more likely the case.

Breaking her self-imposed solitude, despite her claim of indifference, was the most illogical, yet the most correct course of action. But the sudden release of emotion which followed my embrace was unexpected. Something I had wished to be a solely comforting act only further triggered her upset. She, one of the most logical humans I have ever known, moves further from logic daily.

And in a bid to pursue her in this metaphoric chase, I turn again to poetry, to Byron. For Surak's words I know intrinsically, and they do not provide a solution. Comforting my beloved remains... challenging. She is, to some degree, an enigma, even now. Perhaps, more so now than our initial meeting and courtship.

As I walk to the nearest lift I know that I have displeased her, although I still lack familiarity with some human customs, I am quite sure of this. Nyota, she who walks by night. For whom 'I want a word brighter than bright'. The human poet, John Keats once wrote, 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever.' Yet another example of the inconsistencies of human romanticism. Rather, he should have said, 'a thing of beauty is a joy for a singular moment.' After this, it is a thing of beauty alone.

There was a time I recited Byron and Keats for Nyota: 'Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.' She listened, mesmerised by the words, by my mastery of them, perhaps, or by me. In these words, she may have garnered some pragmatic meaning she did not take from all my own. She inferred the emotions I must have implied. In San Francisco we would whisper poetry to one another. A hidden language of metaphors and similes, of puns, sibilance and fricatives, both in the English tongue and in Vulcan.

Perhaps, it was our one source of play.

We recite no more. As Keats once wrote, 'we have woven a web, she and I, attached to this world, but a separate world of our own invention'. It is inhabited by the lies that she tells in order to keep me from discovering her sickness, and truths I have kept to avoid her discovering my greatest weakness.

There is a condition, a psychosomatic illness. It is called Space Adaptation Syndrome, and it affects humanoid species due to the vacuum of space and extreme variations in temperature. With the advances of warp technology, radiation levels are maintained, motion sickness is limited, except in unforeseeable cases. Fluid redistribution and disruption of sensory faculties are symptoms from a distant past. For the most part, the physical symptoms of this Syndrome belong to a bygone age of limited scientific knowledge.

What remains is all the more disconcerting, and far more difficult to successfully treat. It is nevertheless highly common, affecting an average of 32.5% of crew members on missions of three years or more, and this number rises exponentially with the passing of time. Humans are twice as likely to suffer from Space Adaptation Syndrome as Vulcans. However, I am not the average Vulcan, and Nyota, is not the average human.

Anecdotally, I would pinpoint the reason for the human predisposition to the Syndrome to a wholly illogical romanticism of space travel. Many of the humans I formerly tutored at the Starfleet Academy seemed to reflect on deep space as a cyclical party, interspersed with moments from an intriguing novel. They are, of course, sadly mistaken. For the most part space exploration entails consistent and wearying travel; perilous encounters are neither likely nor expected. So this romanticised notion of space is, to quote Einstein, 'merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.'

Once the illusion lifts, symptoms manifest. Nyota has suppressed her Post-Traumatic Stress from the near destruction of the Enterprise. She has spent a year carefully burying the emotions associated with the Nibiru incident in her mind, so carefully hidden, that on a conscious level she may even think that she has successfully excised fear that the incident may repeat itself from her mind.

And finally, she is prone to lucid periods followed by periods of over activity, insomnia and ill-temper. I have been aiding her sleep, melding with her during times when our off-duty hours coincide. Nevertheless, suppressed, subconscious fears reappear. Namely, fears that I will die prematurely, that I will burn to death as I nearly did in a volcano in Nibiru. A death that logic dictates would have been for the benefit of the many has become a night terror for the person I feel the utmost affection for.

Furthermore, I am beginning to deduce that the root cause of this fear is a deep-seated worry that I do not think of her. It seems that no amount of arguing, no amount of altercations can dissuade her from these thoughts, because, according to the numerous literary sources on the subject, this is a predominant cause of concern for human females. They worry that their mates do not think of them.

Therein lies an irony: I think of her constantly, spending meditative hours to free myself from cyclical thoughts of her, her mental health, and how it is now affecting her physical health, how it may come to affect her role as communications officer. I think of her so much that it has become somewhat uncomfortable, what used to be a pleasure, this 'thing of beauty' in our companionship, is now thorny and difficult. And such is the way with all courtship, I am led to believe, both Vulcan and human. There are moments such as these, which define a relationship, and determine its purpose.

Only a superficial perspective would require a closeness such as ours to be filled solely with kisses, with kind words and poetry. However, our present situation is still tenuous. I harbour a single fear, that Nyota may leave our union. As it is still so undefined in human standards.

Thus, I have formulated a plan to persuade her to bond and meld with me permanently. It is the only logical and permanent solution to her present state. That way, she can benefit from the relative calmness of my mind. I can take her mental burdens upon myself, relieve her of the repressed pain, and show her that logic is the path to well-being.

A sense of duty to her guides me in this. A sense of love also. In the Vulcan understanding of relationships, these are not so different things, we act our duties to those we love as a sign of this love, something humans often fail to understand.

The bond between us is the bridge to healing.

If she would only accept such a proposal. If I would only gather up the courage to simply ask her. Yet, every day, every hour, every minute, the chance of her answer being yes, fluctuates with a frenzied intensity.

And I must admit to myself, if to no one else, that her illness, my affection for her, the definition of our relationship, these are not the only reasons I wish to bond with Nyota. There is another: a secret amongst my people, something no outworlder may know. It is akin to the musth, that intermittent condition in male elephants, characterised by highly aggressive behaviour and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.

Another analogy would be the way a salmon must swim upstream to its birthplace to mate, or the way a penguin must go back to one place to bear its young, and the female ferret, which dies if it has not mated by the end of the season.

It is the Pon Farr. A psychophysical condition affecting all Vulcans, both male and female. One which we undergo every seven years. We go into a veritable 'heat', a blood fever, becoming violent, and finally die unless we mate with someone with whom we are empathically bonded or engage in the ritual battle known as the kal-if-fee.

This is an intrusion into our usually logically bound world of work and platonic companionship. It is, perhaps, the one thing that truly terrifies me, to lose control in this way, to become solely ruled by emotion, lost to logic. Lost in the way my beloved seems to be becoming lost, pulled further and further away from me.

I have never spoken to Nyota about this, as I, as all Vulcans, find Pon Farr to be incredibly embarrassing. It is uncontrollable, physical, and frightening, a loss of the logic to which we bind our lives and thoughts.

It is commonly thought that Vulcans do not mate outside of this destructive seven-year period, this death-drive; and that notion, of course, is untrue. However, matters of physicality, of mating and birth are so private that we do not discuss them. It would be illogical to.

Nyota and I have never discussed our sexual relationship. She has accepted my embarrassment, my aversion for the topic, with relentless regard for my sense of well-being. I am doubtful that she even knows about the condition, so little is available for non-Vulcans on the subject.

When in San Francisco, our sexual relationship was satisfactory to both of us, a method through which we grew in closeness. However, during altercations we would participate in sexual intercourse with a lesser frequency. I accepted this withholding of intimacy as part of a human requirement to link physical with emotional need.

We have not participated in this form of congress for over two months. She does not initiate contact of this kind with me, even as we share the same bed to sleep and I cannot read her desire as I once could. We have reached an impasse that only the meeting of minds can bridge.

It is not necessary for me to engage in this contact, however, I am aware that the lack of it is a sign that there is a clear disintegration of communication in our relationship. A lack of libido is also a symptom of Space Adaptation Syndrome. It is a negative sign by all accounts.

The one thing of which I am utterly certain is that I lack any surety where she is concerned. She is a law unto herself. Hence, she functions on limited emotional and physical faculties, far better than many of her colleagues at their peak. She continues to attempt to hide the severity of her affliction, from herself and from me.

Meanwhile, my blood slowly begins to boil. I am reaching, medically, the end of a seven-year cycle, one that I had hoped I was immune from, that I have escaped for years.

It is no wonder we recite no more.

These are unmistakeable signs which point towards an inevitable conclusion, ones that were once made up of my beloved's wild throes, and are now compiled of feigned sleep, preoccupied lovers, that do not quite speak to each other and smile without their eyes.

And as I step onto the bridge, the unthinkable thought comes to me once again, that logic, it seems, has a limit.

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If you haven't already, check out my other fanfic, 'Deuteronomy'. Also, please review, I've heard it's rude not to :)


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